Erika Vause. In the Red and in the Black

In recent years historians of the United States and Great Britain have been devoting more attention to the negative fallout from the increasing use of credit in their countries in the early nineteenth century. Erika Vause is one of the first American scholars to address similar issues in France. Her book In the Red and in the Black: Debt, Dishonor, and the Law in France between Revolutions focuses on efforts to reform two key components of France’s commercial economy during and after the French Revolution: the practice of imprisoning debtors at the request of their creditors, and the laws and procedures governing financial failure and bankruptcies. As a self-professed cultural historian, Vause also seeks to go beyond legal reform narrowly construed to show how laws were applied in practice and how they affected the lives of ordinary people. As one of her graduate school professors remarked, she is “attempting to tell the history of the French economy through the eyes of Balzac” (19). In pursuing this agenda, Vause has read a wide array of published sources and has mined a number of archives in Paris and elsewhere in France. She presents the fruits of that research in seven densely packed chapters—three each on debt prisons and bankruptcy, respectively (four of which have been previously published in full or in part as journal articles or in edited volumes), plus a concluding chapter on how both matters were handled during the revolution of 1848.

Bankruptcy · Creditor · Debt · Economic history · Economics · Political science · Sociology · European Political History Analysis · Finance · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies